Pablo Larraín (2016)
During the thirty-four months of John F Kennedy’s presidency, his wife Jackie was an unprecedented First Lady: a consort of exceptional youth and beauty; a star on TV screens as well as on the pages of newspapers and society magazines. She was both fashion icon and the perfect wife and mother, to the Kennedy’s young children, Caroline and John Jr. Jackie’s demure charisma made her a kind of delightful counterweight to the reality and the paranoia of Cold War politics. A necessary part of that role was being a featherweight counterweight (even though she suffered more than her fair share of maternal trauma: after a miscarriage in 1955, she gave birth the following year to a stillborn daughter and, in August 1963, to a son who survived only two days). In the hours and days that followed her husband’s assassination, however, the public perception of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy changed. The medium that had made her a charming screen celebrity turned Jackie – through the courage and dignity that a worldwide television audience saw – into a substantial heroine.
The timeframe of Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is the immediate aftermath to the assassination, with flashbacks to the events in Dallas and to the recording of and mock-up clips from the television special, A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F Kennedy, which CBS screened on Valentine’s Day 1962. (The programme won Jackie Kennedy a special award at that year’s Emmys.) The inclusion of the latter flashbacks is a clear indication that Larraín and the screenwriter Noah Oppenheim realise the need to remind their audience that the distraught, isolated woman who dominates the film was once this effortlessly chic, relatively carefree hostess. In spite of this, Jackie is dramatically disappointing just because its central character is largely unvarying. Behind closed doors, she doesn’t develop in a way that corresponds to the transformation of Jackie Kennedy’s public image.
The device used to frame the narrative is an interview Jackie (Natalie Portman) gives to a journalist she’s invited to the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port one week after the assassination. The actual interview, which appeared in Life magazine on 6 December 1963, was with Theodore H White whose non-fiction book The Making of the President had recently won a Pulitzer Prize and whom Jackie Kennedy respected. Larraín and Oppenheim turn White into an unnamed Everyjournalist (Billy Crudup) and the purpose of his invitation seems to be to allow Jackie to vent her anger with what’s been written about her husband’s legacy in recent days. She inveighs against the press before she even lets her visitor cross the threshold then insists on the right to decide what he can and can’t reproduce of their conversation. (This turns out to mean editing not just the journalist’s draft article but also his handwritten notes!) The effect of this is to present us immediately with a Jackie who is surprisingly but emphatically tough and authoritative.
On the journey back from Dallas to Washington and the White House, Jackie is bewildered and occasionally incoherent but her distraction is understandable, to put it mildly: it hardly suggests an inherently timid personality. Back in the White House, the young widow (worth remembering she was only thirty-four) disconcerts, by her forthrightness and intransigence, people who are naturally inclined to dictate to her what should happen next in terms of funeral arrangements and protocol: her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and mother-in-law Rose (Georgie Glen), the new President (John Carroll Lynch) and Johnson’s right-hand man Jack Valenti (Max Casella). Jackie’s being strong-willed from an early stage makes the continuing startled reaction of her elders artificial. When Jackie says to Bobby Kennedy, ‘I know you think I’m just a silly little debutante’, the remark makes no sense. Natalie Portman’s Jackie is anything but.
If this seems to be confusing Portman’s characterisation with the strength of her presence and the power of her performance, I think that’s partly inevitable – and raises the question of whether she’s the wrong actress for the role. She’s well cast to the extent that the Jackie Kennedy of Larraín’s film is a woman almost continuously in extremis. Portman, as she showed in Black Swan, has an appetite and an aptitude for miserable intensity. In Jackie, she expresses the heroine’s grief and fury impressively, especially in a sequence in which the weeping Jackie wipes bloodstains from her face in the washroom of the plane taking her husband’s body back from Dallas. It’s no coincidence that she’s less persuasive in the White House tour bits, where you’re conscious of the strain of impersonation of Jackie in happier times. Portman’s looks prompt another question: is physical similarity between a biopic actor and the real-life person they’re incarnating especially important when the subject is an ‘icon’ – that is, someone memorable primarily as an image? Not necessarily perhaps but it matters here, for all the expertise of Natalie Portman and her make-up people. Her features are formally more flawless than Jackie Kennedy’s but her beauty is consequently not so elusive. Portman is more imposing and less mysterious.
The star’s assertive quality is reinforced through Peter Sarsgaard’s weak interpretation of Robert Kennedy. Sarsgaard, in an unusually off-key performance, makes Bobby less shocked and bereft than petulant and neurasthenic. Caspar Phillipson has been cast as JFK for facial similarity but he’s much shorter than the six-foot original. This is made almost comically obvious in an eleventh-hour flashback to Jack and Jackie dancing gaily at a White House ball. (Peter Sarsgaard, far from a giant, towers over Phillipson.) Not for the first time (The Right Stuff, The Butler), LBJ is presented, puzzlingly, as a clod. In this kind of piece, the actors playing less well-known historical personages tend to be at less of a disadvantage. As Nancy Tuckerman, the White House social secretary during the Kennedy administration, Greta Gerwig seems at first to be hiding beneath her wig but she comes through: an exchange between her and Natalie Portman provides one of the few moments in the film where the emotions expressed seem natural and are affecting. About halfway through, Pablo Larraín introduces the character of the Catholic priest (John Hurt) who will officiate at JFK’s interment at Arlington Cemetery. (It wasn’t clear to me when this was meant to be taking place relative to the funeral service and procession.) From this point onwards, Jackie’s conversation with the priest virtually competes with her conversation with the journalist as a framing device. This is odd but the mixture of weakly consoling and more thoughtful, troubling things the priest says is believable. John Hurt plays him well.
In this picture, emotional relentlessness and monotony are two sides of the same coin. While Natalie Portman’s playing compels your attention, the script’s conception of Jackie Kennedy doesn’t supply much in the way of new insight into her personality, once you’ve registered the initial surprise of seeing a harsh, uncompromising aspect. Because Jackie herself isn’t complex, you’re more aware than you might otherwise be of the tabloid, what-really-went-on-behind-the-scenes strand of the movie. And Jackie, exceeding the call of morbid duty, verges on the tasteless in conveying – in images and words – the horror of the physical details of John Kennedy’s assassination. Pablo Larraín may feel it’s important not to shy away from the blood and brains but he achieves a more edifying impact when John Jr suddenly and briefly sobs. (The moment is strong because the tears aren’t caused specifically by the child’s missing his father but make you think how many more inconsolable tears must have followed in the months and years ahead.) While the black-and-white tour-of-the-White-House material is visually convincing, the melding of Larraín’s reconstruction of the funeral scenes with occasional news film inserts isn’t as texturally seamless as you might expect from the director of No.
The Life interview was the source of the Camelot myth of the Kennedy White House. Jackie Kennedy explained to Theodore White that her husband’s favourite late-evening choice for the turntable was the original Broadway cast recording of Camelot and that JFK particularly liked the lyrics in the title song ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’. Larraín works this a bit too hard: we get the song on a bedside record player; then, in the closing stages, Jackie tragically intoning the key lyrics (adding ‘There won’t be another Camelot, not another Camelot’); then Richard Burton’s voice reprising them. This overkill is less of a problem, though, than Mica Levi’s resoundingly sombre music for Jackie. Levi wrote a fine score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin a couple of years ago and her music here is undeniably powerful – too powerful: it’s often competitive with what’s on the screen. I wonder what Adam Mars-Jones will make of it … [1]
20 January 2017
[1] Afternote: The answer is in his review in the TLS (27 January 2017) – http://www.the-tls.co.uk/.
